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New article in the Zeitschrift für Sozialreform

The open-access article "Outdated Enforcement? The Judicialization of Status Determination in the German and Norwegian Platform Economy/  Überholte Regulierungsdurchsetzung? Die Justizialisierung der Statusfeststellung in der deutschen und norwegischen Plattformökonomie" was written by Dr. Fabian Hoose, Dr. Fabian Beckmann, Johanne Stenseth Huseby und Kristin Jesnes as part of a German-Norwegian collaboration and will appear in issue 4/2026 of the Zeitschrift für Sozialreform.
The spread of platform work has provoked academic and policy debates about appropriate ways to embed this form of work into national and supranational institutions of labour regulation. A major instrument of such regulation is the re-classification of platform workers’ employment status, aiming at giving workers access to collective labour rights. While debates have been focused on appropriate regulatory approaches and criteria for status determination, little emphasis has been placed on the practical enforcement of platform workers’ status determination – although enforcement gaps are documented for other non-standard forms of employment and traditional enforcement mechanisms through supervision by unions are largely lacking in the platform economy. Against this background, Germany and Norway, two coordinated market economies characterized by institutional cooperation between the state and the social partners, are used to analyse the institutions, actors and mechanisms for status determination in both countries.
What are the challenges in applying existing enforcement mechanisms for status determination to platform work and do these mechanisms meet the needs of the workers in the platform economy? The analysis draws on qualitative interviews and document analysis, and reveals three major findings:

• First, despite institutional differences, both countries face substantial enforcement gaps as platform-based employment models often remain undetected.
• Second, enforcement authorities follow a rather reactive ‘wait-and-see approach’ and shift responsibility to the legislators.
• Third, these gaps shift enforcement issues from politics to the courts. 

The ambivalent implications of this ‘judicialization’ of labour regulation are discussed and challenges for future enforcement of platform work regulation are outlined.

Download the article: https://doi.org/10.1515/zsr-2025-0021